PARIS,
18 March 1998 - With tragic
attacks causing bloodshed in Egypt and depriving its famous sites
of touist affluence, it is a safe bet that the treasures of the Louvre
will be able to find an audience as preoccupied with cultural
enrichment as it is with safety. The Louvre reopened its Egyptian
antiquities galleries at the end of December with 60% more space
available to exhibit its treasures; after being closed for several
months, the improvements guarantee its stature as one of the finest
museums in the world in this domain, just after the Cairo Museum. A
rapid calculation indicates that looking for one minute at each piece
on display - which is insufficient for certain exceptional works as
the Squatting Scribe, the Colossus of Akhenaton or the
Book of the Dead - a visitor would need ten days without
stopping to eat or sleep to see everything! Magazine and newspaper
articles, books, broadcasts and events of all kinds have accompanied
the Franco-Egyptian year commemorating the bicentenary of Napoleon's
Egyptian expedition and two centuries of "shared horizons".

"Shared horizons"! This noble expression
recalls Saint-Exupéry - "To love is nothing but looking at
each other, looking together in the same direction" - but seems
somewhat idealistic for this marriage of convenience in which France
has not always played a distinguished role. For each Champollion or
Mariette, savior of the Egyptian heritage while at the head of the
Antiquities Department of Egypt, how many soldiers were there who
returned from the banks of the Nile in 1801 suffering from both
humiliation and chronic dysentery, how many rapacious stockholders in
the Suez Canal Company who got rich on the backbreaking and
occasionally mortal labor of the Egyptian fellahs, how many
warmongers in 1956 who were ready to risk an already fragile world
peace in order to save their shares in that company?

While it is true that Egyptology itself was
established by a Frenchman, Champollion, we must not forget that it
has since been developed as much, if not more, by the contributions of
English, German, American or Italian scholars as by the great minds
formed along the banks of the Seine. After all, the best grammar of
ancient Egyptian is the work of an Englishman, the best dictionary is
that of a German. Egyptology is an international science and no single
country can take all the credit. The civilization of the pharaohs
remains the undivided heritage of all mankind. We must not deprive
ourselves of such a splendid opportunity to rediscover Egyptian art.

Among excellent initiatives arising from this celebration,
especially noteworthy were two telecasts on the Franco-German station
Arte that are now available on video cassette. Les Héritiers
de Champollion (Champollion's Heirs), a documentary by Yves de
Peretti, offers parallel views of the renovation of the Egyptian
antiquity galleries of the Louvre and of the digs now in progress
under teams of French archaeologists. The ceaseless back and forth at
the start, not always well motivated, may be disconcerting, but it is
worth the trouble of getting used to it because one meets specialists
who know how to communicate their passion and one at last receives
first-hand information, something sorely lacking in most documentaries
of this type. Where else will you see the sorry state of the tomb of
the most glorious of Pharaohs, Ramses the Great, and where else will
you learn about the hopes aroused by its approaching excavation? Where
else can you be present at the opening of the warehouses containing
the stockpile of the digs in the presence of Egyptian officials,
invariably snubbed in other documentaries even though this minor
ceremony says a great deal about modern Egypt's ability to take its
heritage into its own hands. And then to conclude there is the
following tidbit gleaned by Yves de Peretti in a sidewalk soundbite in
downtown Cairo: "Champollion?...Ah! Yes! Champollion Bonaparte!"

Completely different but entirely complementary is
Philippe Truffault's documentary Les Secrets du Nil (Secrets
of the Nile), which presents a selection of 22 of the most important
works in the new Egyptian galleries of the Louvre. The chronological
presentation, the sober and exact off-camera commentary and the
quality of the image form a classic whole of high aesthetic quality.
Certain details that are normally scandalously ignored put the
finishing touches on the elegance of this broadcast: a finger that
seems to be dusting off the gold of the holy triad of Osorkon
indicates the smallness of the object, lighting that seems to sway
shows the finesse in the texture of a stele. The collection displayed,
in addition to such inevitable choices as the Stele of the Serpent
King (3300 B.C.) or the Head of an Amarnien Princess (1350
B.C.), includes certain objects that - without being as famous as the
preceding objects - nonetheless are extremely interesting from an
archaeological point of view. A major place is given to the Coptic
objects, which will be exhibited in two large galleries in the
renovated museum that were formerly occupied by the Ecole du Louvre.

The December 1997 issue of Géo published an
extensive section devoted to Egypt, also discussing recent digs and,
as usual, excellent photographs.

Claude Rilly is a professor of
classical languages and literature in Paris. He is also an egyptologist
and specialist of meroitic language and civilisation. Claude Rilly has
contributed on Greek archaeology in GEO (France), and on meroitic
phonology in the Göttinger Miszellen (Germany). He is archaeology editor
of Culturekiosque.com.